The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a specification for encryption of electronic data. AES, which employs secret keys, is used for encryption by the U.S. government and other entities worldwide. Security hardware running cryptographic algorithms, such as AES accelerators, are susceptible to side-channel attacks (SCAs). Such attacks may stimulate security hardware in order to extract leaked information, such as power signatures, current signatures, electromagnetic traces or waveforms, timing information, for example. The leakage information may then be used to develop an attack model to extract a secret key from the security hardware. SCAs accordingly pose significant threats to cryptographic systems.
Power SCAs are among the most prominent attack models for private-key encryption systems such as AES. Accordingly, AES accelerators and other hardware security accelerators may advantageously benefit from being made tolerant to or immune to SCAs by being designed to not leak information about embedded secrets (e.g., secret keys).